13: The Nonstandard Scenes of Hudsucker: Pt 1, The Post Credits Open
The average scene that takes place in your average motion picture consists of the following: A location is established. One or more characters enter the scene. They speak lines of dialogue to each other and perform actions. These pieces of dialogue and actions move the plot forward. Once all that has been said to sufficiently move the plot forward, the scene ends, and the film moves on to the next scene. Of course there are more types of scenes than this. If your film is an action movie there will likely be some fight scenes, car chase scenes, and explosion scenes to break these up, but even still these will be broken up by character and dialogue driven scenes. Point Break (1991) is the greatest action movie of all time, but for every one scene of Johnny Utah shooting his gun in the air there are at least two of Bodhi explaining his brand of surfing buddhism to Johnny.
The Hudsucker Proxy however seems to revel in how many ways it can move the story forward by following a different set of rules for how a scene should be set. Of the 37 scenes as marked by the DVD release’s chapter headings 10 do not follow this mold: The opening pre-credits roll, Norville’s job search / Waring Hudsucker’s plummet, Norville’s promotion, Bromo, The Hula Hoop design, The newsreel, The balet, The psychiatric evaluation, Norville’s darkest hour, and Norville’s great redemption, each of them a masterclass in novel ways of telling a story with audio and visuals.
The first post credits scene beautifully depicts volumes not communicated in any way by the dialogue of the scene. Starting as Norville exits the Wolverine Bus running from Muncie to New York and ending as a woman screams beholding Waring Hudsucker’s corpse, the scene is one of two in the film directed not by the Coens but by second unit director Sam Raimi. Raimi (who gave Joel Coen his first job in film as assistant editor of The Evil Dead (1981) with Raimi himself) is also credited as a cowriter of the film and was an accomplished feature director himself, even if The Evil Dead 2 (1987) and Darkman (1990) were not as critically acclaimed as Miller’s Crossing (1990) and Barton Fink (1991). There does not appear to be much of any literature as to what Raimi contributed to Hudsucker’s script, but his mark as 2nd unit director is immediately apparent. Raimi’s directorial style has a clear visual language. He loves highly kinetic visuals and point of view shots, allowing the viewer to zoom through his scenes. In every Evil Dead movie for example, he includes at least one shot of the titular unseen Evil Dead spirit zooming through the woods to possess and/or attack series lead Ash (brilliantly played by Bruce Campbell). These shots were done at a low framerate to create a sped-up visual, and were shot on a camera being carried through the woods on a plank of wood carried by two people running towards Campbell. He referred to this as his “shaky-cam”, a play on the Tiffen corporation’s Steadicam™ rig.
Every time it happens it establishes a kind of visceral reaction in the viewer as we simultaneously worry over Ash’s safety and a kind of dark glee in seeing the Evil Dead attack him as our perspective is the same as the evil spirit. One gets the sense that Raimi’s early DIY breakthroughs led him to love the idea of movement and kineticism in the way he frames his shots, especially if a POV can be used. While there are no Raimi shaky-cam shots in the post-credits opening, its kineticism nonetheless has Raimi’s fingerprints all over it.
As the credits fade out we have an establishing shot of a bus terminal with a bus arriving from Muncie to New York City. Norville disembarkes and is quickly established as a dweeb in over his head in a city full of jobs he can’t get as he looks at the jobs board at the Nidus Employment Agency. While the hilarity of the board itself has already been discussed as has the discussion of how we know that Norville is a huge dork, the shots of Norville reacting to reading roughly 100 jobs listings and him realizing that he in unqualified for each and every one of them shows him growing more disappointed and despondent. This disappointment sets up the beginning of a kind of dramatic palindrome of the start of Norville’s professional life, as he goes from a nobody to a somebody and the end of Waring Hudsucker’s, as he goes from a somebody to his demise.
As Norville realizes he can’t get any of the jobs on the board, we cut to the Hudsucker Industries boardroom* in which we hear Hudsucker board member Stillson droning on about how well the company is doing. While it’s fun to explore the specifics of what Stillson might be saying, the important thing is that just as the jobs board is a comic exageration of Norville’s lack of opportunities, Sillson’s speech is a comic exageration of Waring Hudsucker’s own success and wealth. It’s not so much dialogue in the scene as a kind of droning background noise used to establish Hudsucker Industries’ extreme wealth. Here we also see one of Raimi’s kinetic moments, as the reaction shot of Stillson’s speech isn’t a static shot of the boardoom table or of Waring Hudsucker specificially, but a tracking shot moving along the table. The bottom of the frame shows the lines along the table moving, accentuating the perspective and drawing the gaze toward Hudsucker’s wry smile as he fiddles with his pocketwatch.
perspective forced converging lines. this scene is all about perspective forced converging lines.
The shot then cuts away to Norville reading the want ads for a paper and learning he is unfit to be a Forest Ranger or Cats Meat Man. Norville smiles as he gets up and fiddles for change to buy his cup of coffee. Hudsucker was just smiling as well, but both men are smiling in a way that carries a hidden meaning. Norville is smiling to hide his despair. Hudsucker is smiling because he is carrying his own dark secret of his own imminent death, and perhaps he has found a strange kind of peace in this. Just as importantly, Norville appears to be smiling at nobody. He’s making gestures to his nonexistent coffee companions that communicate “oh don’t worry about me, I’m doing just fine”. He is lonely, he wants to connect, but he’s alone in a strange city so he can’t. Hudsucker in theory is smiling at the good news Stillson is giving him, and he also is surrounded by his colleagues with whom he should be sharing in the good spirit of Stillson’s good news, but in reality, we know that his smile is private. Once again, as Norville is down but is about to be on the way up, Hudsucker is up and about to be on the way down.
Norville then sets his coffee cup down on the newspaper he is reading, leaves two nickels for his coffee with a penny for a tip, ultimately though deciding he’d better keep the penny given the paucity of his prospects. As the server clears his setting we see that his coffee cup has made a circular mark around the ad that will connect Norville and Hudsucker, an ad for the Hudsucker Industries mail room, which the wind then picks up and blows out the door in Norville’s direction.
The shot cuts back to the Hudsucker board room with once more the only dialogue being Stillson’s speech. As he speaks, the same movement of the camera along the table is continuing, this time moving away from Hudsucker towards the window. Stillson should be the subject of this shot as the one speaking, but he’s more of a prop. The same perspective lines of the table that were pointing our gaze towards Waring Hudsucker now point us towards the boardroom window. Behind the window are some nondescript outlines of other Manhattan skyscrapers, but these are clearly intended as background. The subject of the shot is the window itself.
The shot then cuts to a closer shot of Hudsucker himself (still moving though! Gotta keep up that trademark Raimi kineticism!) as his smile slowly leaves his face. The same tracking shot focusing on the window returns, now beginning to push Stillson out of frame. As the shot lingers, Stillson’s voice fades out, nailing home the idea that Hudsucker is not really listening to him and that he is not the focus of this shot and this moment. All of the movement of the frame has established an axis of movement along the boardroom table, creating a single line from Hudsucker’s seat to the window along which the action is grounded. Cutting from Hudsucker’s face to the window also gives the shot a beckoning quality, as though Hudsucker is being drawn to the window (which of course he very shortly will be).
The shot cuts to Norville walking down the sidewalk, with the sidewalk centered in frame the same way the table just was, drawing our gaze to him walking away. Once again the shot is not static, the camera is following him as the very same newspaper he left in the diner is following him down the street.
Just as the window beckons to Hudsucker, the newspaper beckons to Norville, causing him to grab it and have his own gaze drawn to the Hudsucker Industries want ad, offering “Low Pay • Long Hours” but more importantly: “NO EXPERIENCE NECESSARY”
The shot cuts back to the boardroom, this time with the camera backing away from the window but along the same axis of movement established with every other shot, and we cut back to Waring Hudsucker, his ironic smile now gone, and a kind of deep yearning appearing in his eyes. He briefly looks the way one would hope a lover would look at them, with a kind of quiet awe. He briefly snaps back to reality as we cut to a shot of Stillson delivering the last few lines of his speech, capping it with what we have been able to surmise, that “we’re loaded”. As the boardroom laughs he sets his watch down, and for the second time in the film we see a clock face with both hands pointing at 12:00, the first of course being the pre-credits opening of the film as we see the Norville Barnes of New Years Eve contemplating suicide as the Hudsucker Industries clock is about to strike midnight. As the clock strikes 12:00 it appears time is up for the President of Hudsucker Industries, no matter who he might be.
Waring Hudsucker himself then clears his throat, the closest thing he has to a line in the entire film as a mortal man. The camera then pans back and gives us the entirety of the boardroom table from an upward angle, yet again with the converging lines of the table pointing our gaze directly out that window, with the tension building as he climbs on the table, the only sound being the squeaking of his feet on the table’s varnish and the tick tock of Hudsucker’s pocket watch. The converging lines of the table now directing us toward Hudsucker’s feet as he shakes them loose. Stillson’s speech was more or less background noise for the entirety of the scene, so it feels like we hear our first line of natural dialogue (and the only one in the scene) as a board member named Addison with spectacular eyebrows asks: “Mr. Hudsucker?” Even a viewer going into this scene without any knowledge of what is to come has the visuals set up of the table as a walkway or track, and the window being the terminal point of that track, a morbid kind of door that Hudsucker is about to go through.
At this exact moment we then cut to Norville, as he begins to cross Madison Ave to get to the doors of the Hudsucker building. As he does, the camera pans out and up, forcing our perspective towards upwards parallel lines of the columns of the building that also mildly converge, creating the same direction of gaze back to the boardroom where Norville is ultimately headed. As Raimi subliminally points a way upwards for Norville, we cut to Hudsucker breaking into a sprint towards the window and thus his ultimate downward trajectory. The shots then quickly alternate between the two of them as Norville crosses the sidewalk and Hudsucker crosses the table so that we fully understand that at 12:00 noon exactly, the moment Norville enters the building, Waring Hudsucker leaves it.
The next shot of Hudsucker from behind gives us the very same parallel lines of the columns converging in the distance that pointed Norville’s way up now point us straight towards Waring Hudsucker as he flies towards the Manhattan pavement. It would take about 8-9 seconds for a person to fall 45 floors in reality, but Raimi bends time in a very Hudsucker Proxy way and gives us 30 seconds to contemplate Waring Hudsucker’s final moments, giving us shots from below Hudsucker, above him, and from his point of view to give us all the various hyperkinetic zoom-y trademark Sam Raimi shots he can squeeze into this moment, until the clock’s last bells for 12:00 Noon strike as Hudsucker hits the ground with a splat. In an apparent nod to an old colloquialism, Waring Hudsucker’s life is over as a fat lady screams.
Norville’s hopelessness at being unable to find work and start his new life as a New Yorker which he finds a way out of by finding the entrance to the Hudsucker Tower is perfectly mirrored by Waring Hudsucker seemingly being trapped by his own success and finding a way out of it by making a new exit to the Hudsucker Tower. We know that Norville will end up president of the company and we know that he too will be despondent enough to potentially want to jump off the building, so we go into the scene knowing that what’s happening to Hudsucker will also in some way be happening to Norville. The two men’s destinies are entwined by the scene, a scene in which neither of them meet, and a scene in which neither of them speak a single line of dialogue to each other.
*job board to boardroom? Further subliminal punning? Very possibly